ALBUM REVIEW: In Asylum Requiem – Shadowflag

SHADOWFLAG from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire kicked down the British black metal door with their self-titled debut in 2013, immediately upping the uniqueness factor by basing their first album on a 5,000 word poem and establishing a reputation for intense live shows featuring a drum machine. The White Grave in 2015, The Delusion Machine two years later and a live recording in 2018 continued their penchant for spoken-word narrations while the musical aspect steadily improved with each new iteration and a full-time drummer was eventually enlisted.

The press release for this year’s new full-length In Asylum Requiem states that the record is for fans of SATYRICON, MAYHEM, KHOLD and CRAFT. No surprises there. The biggest shock comes upon listening through the album and finding no trace of the band’s single most defining element, namely the aforementioned spoken-word poetry. On several occasions throughout the runtime, the vocals briefly drop into the lower, menacing register previously used for the narrations, which ties the album in with its predecessors from a stylistic point of view but leaves the listener feeling that something is missing.

This is a short record, its six tracks running to just over half an hour with the final cut alone accounting for 10 minutes. On the whole this is a less experimental and relatively faster album than the previous three. Lest The Night Be Thorned starts things off in very promising fashion: no intros or samples, straight in with a mid-paced riff and the clearly enunciated vocals that immediately tie in with SHADOWFLAG’s past works. The band takes a general approach similar to Canada’s MEGIDDO or Finland’s BARATHRUM circa Legions of Perkele, adding dramatic keys and clean lead guitar before running the whole thing through an icy Scandinavian production.

And this could well summarise the whole record. There is little deviation from this formula, which does not necessarily detract from the enjoyment…at first. Brief blast-beat sections rear their head here and there and One Beast One God adopts an almost industrial aesthetic, but by the time we get to From Agony To Cold and Nameless Realm Eternal, the recipe starts to stretch a bit thin. The former track features an unexpected gear change in the second half and the latter opts for a more dissonant and unsettling approach, with multi-tracked vocals and screams adding to the chaos.

At 10:20, closer To The Earth, To The Corpse, To The Seas aims to be the culmination of the whole adventure. Boasting its own intro and slow build-up, it sadly fails to bring anything new to the table and ends up sounding exactly like any other track here.

Perhaps due to the saturation of the international black metal scene, the lack of a coherent ‘album’ feel – playing more like a collection of individual songs, at least musically – and, above all, the loss of their most personal characteristic, In Asylum Requiem fails to impress. While any of these tracks could be added to a decent playlist, SHADOWFLAG appear to have fumbled the ball slightly here, failing to reach the terrifying depths of their previous studio output.

Rating: 5/10

In Asylum Requiem is set for release on June 19th via Clobber Records.

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